Costco Connection - August 2006

Tooning in

DAVE KELLET T, 32, a copywriter and Costco member who lives in Los Angeles, is creator of Sheldon ( www.sheldoncomics.com), an online comic strip. Kellett, who has been cartooning since the third grade, launched the daily Sheldon comics in 1999 and conservatively estimates that he has 10,000 readers. Pure Ducky Goodness, Kellett’s first book collection of his popular comic strip is available at his Web site.—Will Fifield

Sideways sentences

WHEN COSTCO MEMBER Darryl Green bought an RV with a sleeping module that left no more than 2 feet between the mattress and the ceiling, he thought his reading-in-bed days had ended. He didn’t have enough room to lean over and prop up the book as he normally did. And reading on his stomach hurt. That’s when he wondered if it would be possible to lay a book on the bed and read sideways.

Introduced earlier this year, Green’s Bed Books look like a typical books on the outside, but inside the text runs in two columns from the edge to the gutter, not from top to bottom. The design is meant to allow readers to lie and read in any comfortable position.

“You can read them
sitting up—like any other
book,” says Green. “After five minutes,
you forget you’re reading [sideways].”

Currently, classic texts—such as

Wuthering Heights, The Call of the Wild and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court—are available. More information about available titles is available at www.bedbooks.net.

—Stephanie E. Ponder

The Rodin of packaging

DARRYL GREEN

IT COMES AS no surprise that Costco
member Richard Commins, a retired
high-school shop teacher in Sacramento,
California, can look at a piece of wood
or clay and see what it will become
in his hands. But when he began to
see artistic possibilities in cardboard
boxes, he crossed over from
artisan to visionary.

It all started about 10 years ago after a Costco shopping spree. Commins began transforming bulky packaging into the shapes he envisioned. His creations sell for between

$60 and $100. If you are interested in learning more about Commins’ art, e-mail him at

r.t.commins@ yahoo.com.—WF

Adam@Home by Brian Basset

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